The Thai government is going to the polls at the beginning of February in a bid to break the country's political deadlock, but the Thai opposition is treating the election as meaningless. It's just one more example of a world-wide trend of questioning the basic worth of democracy itself. Author of The Confidence Trap, David Runciman, puts the Thai situation into perspective.

Transcript

MARK COLVIN: As we reported earlier this week, the Thai government is going to the polls at the beginning of February in a bid to break the country's political deadlock.

But the Thai opposition is treating the election as meaningless.

Instead of the government of Yingluck Shinawatra, backed by her self-exiled brother Thaksin, the opposition want the appointment of what they call a "people's council" to rule Thailand.

It's just one more example of a world-wide trend of questioning from all sorts of directions the basic worth of democracy itself.

I've been reading a book about that crisis: The Confidence Trap by David Runciman, who's Professor of politics at the University of Cambridge.

I asked him to put the Thai situation in some sort of perspective.

DAVID RUNCIMAN: It's symptomatic of that impatience that people have with the mess and the confusion of democracy. And there's always, in most democracies, an impulse to want something purer, that works better. And elections are symptomatic of people's frustration.

I think anyone who lives in a democracy is torn at election time: on the one hand, elections are meant to be the moment where the people get their chance to really stamp their mark; and on the other hand, elections are this confused, chaotic, usually disappointing process.

So there's that underlying impulse and you see it in lots of places. I think in younger democracies, maybe, the process is more raw and it might be more raw at the moment in Thailand.

MARK COLVIN: In a place like Thailand, where they're calling for a people's council, what kind of a people's council might there be? I mean, is there any such thing historically that would be distinguishable in any way from, say, a junta?

DAVID RUNCIMAN: The historical record is not good, you have to say. The call for something that cuts through and gives a more direct controlling kind of democracy, where people feel that there is that sort of control of the kind you might get from a people's council, the impulse behind it is to get away from the confusion and the mess. It's towards something that is more autocratic and controlling.

But the historical record is that those experiments tend not to work. The mess reasserts itself and, in a way, that's the strength of democracy: when the mess, the improvisation reasserts itself. That desire for a kind of purity: I don't think there's a good set of historical examples that that's going to play out well.

MARK COLVIN: So what is the record of authoritarian or non-democratic experiments in the modern world?

DAVID RUNCIMAN: At the moment, part of the difficulty of making sense of contemporary democracies is there's such a range of experiments. Political scientists call them "hybrid regimes", which have this mix of some democratic elements - maybe elections, maybe relatively liberal laws about certain things - and yet forms of authoritarian control. That's quite recent.

I think the longer-term historical record is that the advantage that democracies have - and this is one of the things I say in the book - is that well-established democracies, where there's wide expectation that you will revert back to the familiar pattern, they can experiment particularly in crises, in wars and so on, with authoritarian types of government and then come back.

Authoritarian regimes, or younger, more fragile democracies - they find it much harder to experiment because they're much less flexible. So the advantage of flexibilities on the democratic side, that's the thing that authoritarian regimes lack. These hybrid regimes are a new kind of experiment. I think history suggests that that experiment is unlikely to go well either.

DAVID RUNCIMAN: My sense of it is that it is the least worst alternative but that there's a lot to be said for that.

It's the rising above that poses the challenge, because living in a system that is the least worst - and this is one of the things that I try and describe over the last hundred years, the history of democracy seen as the least worst system - is that it does have lots of moments of success but there's this contstant accompaniment of people frustrated with the desire, that it doesn't achieve its potential. It doesn't rise to the occasion.

Democracies are very bad at rising to the occasion. Authoritarian regimes are better. They're better at those moments of control. Toqueville is one of the heroes in my book. He says, "Democracy is an untimely form of government." It never quite gets a grip when you need it.

And yet, when seen in the long run, that ability to keep chopping and changing and avoid the worst-case scenarios, particularly to avoid getting stuck with mistakes, when democracies get things wrong, they quite quickly adapt. That in the long run actually produces a pretty dynamic form of politics.

MARK COLVIN: So what is the confidence trap, in fact? I mean, you say that is a trap and I'm not going to ask you how to get out of it because I don't think you've really got an answer.

DAVID RUNCIMAN: No. I do want to say and I say at the very end: it's a trap and it's not a tragedy. There is always a sort of an intellectual's desire sometimes to think that things are really catastrophic and that we're doomed. We're not.

The trap is that you have to have confidence in democracy for it to work, precisely because at any given moment it tends to look like it's not working. It's a mess, it's frustrating. So people who live under stable democracies, they have to believe that in the long run the mess is worth it.

The trap is that that belief can produce a kind of complacency because you look at your politics, you look at western politics now in Europe, in the United States, perhaps even in Australia and you think, "Well, this system isn't really working well but it's a democracy and the thing about democracy is in the long run it will deliver its rewards." And that can lead to a kind of drift. It can lead to blind spots.

One of the reasons democracies keep getting into crises is that they're very hard at spotting the future challenges that are coming down the line. So that's the trap: you need to have faith in it but the faith produces blind spots and the blind spots can be dangerous.

MARK COLVIN: Professor David Runciman of Cambridge University, author of The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis.

And it was part of a longer interview which you can hear on our website from this evening.